Public emergency communications systems are known to respond to the placing of an emergency call by retrieving database information identifying the physical location of the caller and providing this location information to the personnel who receive the emergency call. One such system is the US E-911 emergency telephone system, an illustrative example of which is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,924,491.
Many organizations that have their own premises communications systems (e.g., a PBX or a key telephone system) have emergency-call policies that require employees to place on-premises emergency calls to the telephone number of the organization's local security personnel instead of to the public emergency number (e.g., 911). The security personnel in turn call the public emergency number after they have gathered information from the caller, and pass this and other information on to the public emergency personnel. The reason for such policies is that, when a call is placed to the public emergency number from the premises communications system, only the calling phone number and the central address associated with the premises system is made available to the public emergency personnel. But that central address may not be the location of the calling number; for example, it may be a home-office location, a front-office location, or a security-office location of the organization. Thus, the public-emergency personnel may be misdirected when responding to the call. Requiring the emergency call to be made to the organization's security personnel enables the security personnel to determine the exact location of the caller and then direct the public emergency personnel to the appropriate building, entrance, floor, etc., in other words, to the exact location where the emergency is occurring. The unfortunate and serious downside of this policy is that the sequential calling which it engenders adds delay to the response time of the emergency crew, which can endanger both lives and property.